Thursday, September 20, 2007

Interviewed on TV

I've just got back from appearing live on a programme on one of the local TV stations, TV Makedonia here in Thessaloniki. A nerve wrecking experience as you can imagine, not helped by the fact that the interview was all in Greek and not my mother tongue.

Once again, the photographs I posted on this blog of what happened when I was violently detained by the Greek riot police, simply for taking pictures of them have had effects in the "real world". I was contacted by a journalist yesterday who had seen my blog and wanted me to come in and tell my side of the story.

As well as talking to me, the presenters talked by phone with a representative of the Panhellenic Federation of Police Employees, who, by strange coincidence is in many of the pictures I took on Saturday, 8th. The person, whose name escapes me for the moment, categorically insisted that I had no right as an ordinary citizen (i.e not an accredited member of the mainstream media) to take pictures of him in the street. Indeed, that as there was a march going on that I should not have been doing so.

Even when the presenter asked him which law stated this (which as far as I can see doesn't exist) he insisted on the fact that such photography was not permitted.

I don't know what is scarier; that a police officer is so unaware of basic rules governing conduct in public spaces or the fact that they feel that they can impose whatever rule they want, at a whim.